Aspiring-Life

In my late teens I became interested in Japanese culture, particularly a manga called Naruto (I know, so childish, but I love a good story), which is why I picked orange background colors for this blog. I felt I could relate to this character, being perceived by other people outwardly as troublesome and maybe even evil, but misunderstood. It gelled with me because I rarely had a connection with a person who understood what I was actually thinking or feeling. It came with a pressure on me I felt since I was about 4 years old, I guess the closest description is gloom. I became very introverted and only had a few rare comments to make to people.

Later on in my late teens I started to work and this started a period of about 10 years when I was fixated on making something of myself, studying and working in various jobs, to avoid a fate of what I feared would be poverty. During those years I rarely slept, having about 3 hours a night. This caused me without noticing to slip from a gloom into a depression, then burnout, and lastly a psychosis and possible schizophrenia (although I have my doubts about this last one).

I want to try to describe the process of slipping into psychosis to you, since it has been explained to me that I have some insight into the condition (I am able to recognize that something is wrong, while insanity tries to take over). Hopefully you will then find it not so scary a process.

Describing parts of it to AI it appears my experiences are known in some theories. It started with Incubation + Illumination. I’ve known myself during my childhood to spend a long time, sometimes a year making observations and noting memories of what people have said and done quietly in the back corner of my mind. At some random point I start a process of deeply thinking about these events and what they mean and what else I could have done and change my approach quite rapidly. In my 10 year work and study journey I did not do this ‘reflection’ at all, I was so focused on learning and working that events and time passed by.

After I had struggled in the workplace with my ethics not matching the companies I worked for and the company I was in, in a miserable and burnt out state I began to start reflecting over 10 years all the events. It was extremely painful. I described it to a doctor as a hand squeezing my brain and he called it a tension headache.

I started to question and process everything more and more and my ‘logic’, the part that keeps me grounded and focused started to get weaker and fade and my spirit that had kept me moving forward after setbacks finally gave up. I slept very long hours with occasional panic attacks. New ideas and thoughts started to flow during this time and I can describe it as a dream state, where peoples’ interactions with me were incorporated into an evolving view of the world, where I was both awake and asleep at the same time.

This disturbed state, where I had heightened awareness and stress, was a state where my world view, which I call a ‘model of reality’ was being challenged by new observations and senses, where I would notice extremely slight changes in body language and the words that people that spoke to me. I noticed that everything suddenly had deep meaning and it gave me a huge shock, having been in a state that was basically ignoring everything before.

This feeling of great meaning evolved into a sense of fear, that if I had noticed these things now, other people would have been noticing these subtle things about me all along. I began to feel that people would dislike me because of this and that people’s attempts to help me were actually an intervention to stop me from being an evil person. After this, my logic questioning if people really felt this way about me, as well as feedback from people that opposed my view of myself, became quite weak and tired.

I began to read my phone furiously looking for how widespread this view of myself was among other people and began to distrust the words that I was reading. I started to look for meaning in them, what I should do to be accepted by people again and began to hold onto quotes and lessons from movies I had watched in childhood and songs to use as a guide to be a better person. When these ideas were challenged by new information and observations, I abstracted again, and started to believe that the real lessons I needed to learn were faith-based ones, due to my Christian upbringing.

I believe this is the disturbance stage, where your worldview is shifting from one concrete view based on shared experiences and understanding with other people, to a theoretical one, where new possibilities challenge the existing stable one that has helped you to navigate daily life and relationships. Input from the environment, people and childhood fears of Armageddon shaped this period and it was quite distressing not having a solid view and understanding of myself. In hindsight I wish I had more guidance from someone during this period, a stern hand rather than empathy gave me something to focus on.

I was admitted to an mental health clinic where input was reduced and drugs given to stabilize me. The process of learning did not stop and I began reacting to this new foreign environment, believing it was a holding place where I had to learn how to be a better person before I moved onto a heavenly realm (imagine my disappointment when I finally got out).

During this stage my thoughts started to gather. I looked for meaning in the pictures and writings on the wall, thinking these items which seemed out of place, were put there for a reason. My new worldview solidified and I was at peace mentally. I ended up getting released, more I think due to there needing to be room for more patients than actually having a solid grasp on a new workable model of reality. It took many more months of thinking, reflecting and ruminating before I was able to achieve a somewhat positive new model of reality, but it was definitely more evolved than my old one, and had its traumas. The result was that I was more wiser in my relationships with people and started to observe more and I became a lot more philosophical in it, than my focused, ethically driven old one.

As for driving without a seat belt, I still do it sometimes, when I am deep in thought..